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Like I guess most of us have done, I have spent a while looking at the various playing surfaces out there. I even made my own, which sadly hasn't lived up to expectations, and I'm fed up trying to flatten creases in the felt. So I wanted to try out a vinyl surface. I looked at the usual suspects, but I'm a bit of an astronomy geek, and the available stuff mostly looked pretty dull. The real universe is jawdroppingly pretty, and I knew of a source of ultra-high resolution images of it - Hubble. There is a huge gallery of Hubble images online, and they are copyright free. NASA encourage you to use them as you want. So I found a reasonably priced banner printer and got busy. The images below are what I ended up with. For a 3x3 and a 6x3 I was £56 including shipping.

*note, these are severely compressed. To work with Hubble images at native resolution, you need a fair bit of horsepower in your computer.

The mats should be here sometime next week, so I'll let you all know how they turn out.

3x3 Hubble view of the mystic mountain in the carina nebula.


6x3 Hubble view of galaxy m106


Who wants boring fields of stars when you can have reality?

Good work...

I was able to do a 4X4 mat for $25 from a banner company (including shipping). They also did my Dreadball mats (4 of them also for $25 including shipping. ) Great for the price!

Love the Hubble Images... best thing our government has produced in the last 20 years. (I jest... or do I?)

Well the government did produce a dead Binladen body. And a good deal of ISS. Though otherwise...yeah not much.

P.S. Join the movement! Convince everyone that ISS needs to be parked at a lag range point after it's decommission instead of being crashed into the atmosphere!